Laid off right before Christmas, Now Vengeance is Mine | Hacker News Reader

Laid off right before Christmas, Now Vengeance is Mine

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18 pointsrmason7 comments

From my experience of having worked in many large multi national corporations , it is not unusual to find many mini applications running out of someone's desktop tucked away under the table or in a cupboard somewhere. They seem to largely cater to automation tasks that someone in the business had asked a developer to develop or something a developer had developed that has become the norm. I still see a lot of excel macros and spreadsheet consolidation "applications" that have graduated from the cottage industries within the organisation. Having said that they never ever tend to be business critical. They dont run the business. These are the types of stuff that will make a few business operations folks lives easier. They are not meant to run the business. Any large business that has an application that is responsible for revenue to the tune of millions would definitely be audited frequently. If and big If this is true , the controls and oversight process is horrendous in this case

Assuming this is true, I hope he has a good lawyer. There are a couple different avenues this company could use to go after him, and even if they don't win in court he could end up far in debt.

Came to the party after the post was edited. Does anybody have a mirror?

You can't patent source code, IIRC. You definitely can't patent a kill switch.

You can get patents on what the source code does, that's the basis of so many of these stupid "answer a phone, take notes, but using a computer" style patents that are a huge cause of pain. It's very possible, if this story is true (and I'm sceptical), that they could have got a patent on everything the code does, including covering a kill switch. It'd be null and void about as fast as anyone could say "prior art", but that doesn't stop it being issued.

Well, he says the source code lives "on his computer" and he "owns the patent for it". That implies that he patented the source code, which you cannot do. You can copyright source code, I think, but you can't patent the actual code.

This story is sort of fake on the face of it. He said in the story that they used to hire a vendor to take care of what his program did, which implies prior art. And if the company is really losing millions of dollars a week, well, last I checked, it's a lot cheaper to hire lawyers, get a temporary injunction, stop the bleeding, and invalidate the patent.

Sort of doubting the veracity of this, but at the same time really wanting it to be true.

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